NASA

Satellite Science Data Processing with PostgreSQL

Over the last several decades, NASA has been one of the major
collectors of Earth climate observations from space. The quantity of
data from satellites has been exploding with the current generation
producing hundreds of terrabytes of science data products each year.

The tools used to process this vast quantity of data have evolved over
the years as well. This talk will include an overview of science data
processing and discuss the evolution of the ground system processing
from large scale proprietary Unix platforms and traditional commercial
databases to Open Source solutions including commodity clusters of
Linux machines, Perl based software frameworks, and PostgreSQL. It
will discuss how we use PostgreSQL to track metadata and provenance
throughout the data processing.